Future of Music Listening

As I played around with Google Play Music and uploaded some of my music, I got to wondering what the future of my music listening would be like. Currently I have a bunch of music loaded into iTunes which I listen to on my computer. I also put the same music on iPod because that keeps the same play counts as iTunes. I also have all my music rated and use custom playlists based on the rating, play count, and when I added the song to iTunes. That’s a lot of complexity which I don’t think any cloud service will be able to reproduce.

But the trend seems to be to stream music online (and perhaps charge subscription) to your device. If not that, at least your music is on the cloud and accessible anywhere. That seems like a good idea, but i have no idea how I will convert my music listening to that approach!

Even a hybrid approach is difficult. I organize my music by genre instead of the typical artist/album approach. It’s a big mess when I want to upload because I want to convert them to the “standard” organization first. I suppose I can just upload a lot of garbage and have Google help me sort the files, but I have a second problem – which is that I have a lot of singles and not that many albums. Then I end up with a lot of artist entries that only have a few songs (don’t get me started on various artist albums and having the correct album artist). It starts breaking the experience and I wonder, why I don’t stick with the status quo.

In fact I’m thinking, maybe I should draw a line where I started buying (cheap!) complete albums from Amazon and Google Play, and just start building my music collection starting from that!